The $300 House: The Performance Challenge

Editor’s note: This post is one in an occasional series on Vijay Govindarajan’s and Christian Sarkar’s idea to create a scalable housing solution for the world’s poor. Each post will examine the challenge from a different perspective, including design, technology, urban planning and more. Today, Douglas K. Smith looks at ways to make sure project performance stays on track.

Kudos to Vijay Govindarajan and Christian Sarkar for taking a moment to reflect on Affordable Housing Institute founder David Smith’s observation that markets alone will never successfully house any nation’s poorest people. Indeed, a decade after the Neighborworks’ America’s Achieving Excellence in Community Development project, it’s not even clear if markets can successfully house middle-income people. Certainly, the tens of millions of people the world over who now face foreclosure are testimony to dramatic market failures, and to an urgent need for better housing solutions.

Govindarajan and Sarkar went one better and issued a challenge to leading professionals, companies and non-profits to contribute to a demonstrably better future for billions by conceiving of and creating a $300 House for the poor. It’s the kind of challenge we emphasize in Achieving Excellence, one that is urgent and compelling. It will also need the same drivers as Achieving Excellence projects: clear, measurable, SMART outcome-based goals that drive real, deep innovation and change.

Will this be tough? Yes. Will it require ingenuity as well as trial and error? Yes. But the world is blessed with enormously talented and experienced people who have the capacity to succeed at this challenge.

How?

The best way we’ve found is to apply the philosophy and disciplines of challenge-centric, performance-driven change. These disciplines have dramatically expanded existing capability to make a difference for both U.S. and global organizations that work with the Rapid Results Institute. In hundreds of situations where improvement was needed, from agriculture to health, to safe water and others, Rapid Results has challenged community leaders and volunteers to tap into and build on their own extensive capacity for self-improvement by issuing performance challenges. They establish razor sharp 100-day goals that everyone drives toward.

Using a structured performance methodology like Rapid Results’, people can join in communal 100-day projects for quantity, quality and innovation. Our experience shows that when people take control of their effort against well defined goals, innovation happens.

David Smith’s observation that triggered Govindarajan’s and Sarkar’s challenge included this trenchant point: the world’s poor already solve housing problems through extensive self-building and ingenuity. Surely, then these same people can improve on their current approaches through finding better solutions. Far too often, policies and practices in socio-economic development assume that the poor lack capacity for problem-solving, let alone self-improvement. Too often, policy is done to the poor instead of with the poor. It’s a dramatic error in judgment that shouldn’t be made here. We must expand this $300 House challenge to the billions of people themselves who can and will benefit from low cost, energy efficient and better housing.

Imagine, then, what can and will happen when those with great resources and talents — the companies, professionals and leading non-profits — collaborate from the beginning with those who will live in these $300 houses. Let’s even take it one step further and challenge the architects, designers and builders who help conceptualize solutions to share ownership of any intellectual property with those at the community level who challenge themselves to join in the creation and realization of this aspiration.

Finally, if you’re the CEO of a global company that could make a difference by participating in the development of the $300 House, you’ll be interested in how the results of the latest goodpurpose study confirm what I proposed in my book, On Value and Values. Apparently consumers in Brazil, China, India, and Mexico are more likely to purchase and promote brands that support good causes, outpacing their peers in the West. According to the study:

Sixty-nine percent of consumers globally believe corporations are in a uniquely powerful position to make a positive impact on good causes, and the number is as high as 80 percent in the U.S. and 82 percent in Mexico.

Nearly two-thirds of global respondents (64 percent) believe it is no longer enough for corporations to give money; they must integrate good causes into their everyday business

Seventy percent of global consumers say that a company with fair prices that gives back is more likely to get their business than a company that offers deep discounts and doesn’t give back.

“Protecting the environment” ranks as the no. 1 cause that global consumers care about, followed by “improving the quality of healthcare”.

Globally, 71 percent of consumers believe that projects that protect and sustain the environment can help grow the economy, with even higher numbers for China, Mexico, India, Brazil, and the U.S (87, 81, 81, 79, and 75 percent, respectively).

What are you waiting for? Join www.300house.com. Were we all to do that, then not only would there be $300 houses that increased in value as assets but also additional assets that could help spread the world’s wealth in more sustainable, equitable ways.